The depressing thing about a glut of bad movies is that they lower your expectations and also your standards. 'Blade,' the latest MTV-PlayStation software, isn't anything great -- some of it isn't any good at all -- but compared to tripe like 'Godzilla' and 'The Avengers,' it looks like a Fritz Lang film.

Blade is fast and painless and sometimes agreeably cheesy, with a string of solid supporting performances. Coming at the end of the lethal summer of 1998, it's neither a highlight nor a lowlight; it's a mediumlight, I suppose. I wasn't bored, but I wasn't excited either.

Blade, the half-vampire "daywalker" whose mission in life is to dispatch as many bloodsuckers as possible, began life in the '70s as a popular character in the Marvel comic book Tomb of Dracula. Blade's mother, you see, was bitten by a vamp while pregnant with Blade; vampirism ran in his veins, so his obsession carried a personal twist beyond the standard you-killed-my-mother-prepare-to-die vendetta. As comic-book heroes go, Blade (at least in his '70s incarnation -- I'm not familiar with the more recent Marvel comics) was tough and driven but also witty. His creator, Marv Wolfman, always made sure to write sharp dialogue for him, and Wolfman even gave Blade the unlikely partner Hannibal King, a turncoat vampire (who predated Hannibal Lecter, in case you wondered).

Good ol' Hannibal is missing from the movie Blade, and so is 99 percent of Blade's personality. As played by Wesley Snipes (also one of the producers), he's a big hunk of wood with a stylish haircut and an arsenal that puts Rambo's to shame. Blade is such a stoic bad-ass that you keep wanting to laugh, but Snipes -- who is not a humorless man, as his performances elsewhere certify -- never quite lets you. He takes Blade and this movie far too seriously, never riding with the absurdity of it or showing the redeeming charisma of, say, Chow Yun-Fat. In his review, Roger Ebert ranked Blade among New Line's other recent genre pictures Dark City and Spawn. I would, too -- they're all grim-faced, pompous comic-book movies for people who think narrative begins and ends with Todd McFarlane.

Director Stephen Norrington seems to know there's nothing going on with Snipes, because he surrounds the star with colorful actors, such as Stephen Dorff as the nasty, ambitious vampire Deacon Frost (since he and Snipes have both played drag queens, think of their final conflict as the Battle of the Divas), N'Bushe Wright as a hematologist whose blood research comes in mighty handy, Kris Kristofferson as Blade's grizzled old mentor and weapons specialist, and the great Udo Kier as a genetically "pure" vampire. Kier, who once played the big-cheese vampire in the cult classic Blood for Dracula, gives his scenes a dash of welcome Teutonic flavor; too bad he doesn't have much else to do.

Neither does Blade, really. Oh, he's active as all get-out -- every reel or so, he shows up at some vamp hang-out, unsheathes his sword, and gives the director another excuse for pounding techno music and Cuisinart editing. But compared to the Blade of the comics, this hero is dumb bordering on suicidal; he never seems to have a strategy aside from crashing vampire parties.

The old Blade relied more on smarts than on brute strength and superior firepower. That's what's missing from Blade, and what makes it a reasonably diverting video-game of a movie but not successful entertainment.